A Friendship That Ended the War

1—GUESTS AT THE HANOI HILTON

On Memorial Day in 1993, two United States senators were escorted through a prison in downtown Hanoi. It was a massive building, enclosed in a compound and occupying most of a block in the middle of the crowded city. The windows had bars, and some had louvred shutters. The Vietnamese name for the prison was Hoa Lo. The name given it by Americans was the Hanoi Hilton. During the war, the prison held captured fliers, whom the Vietnamese called “air pirates,” and on this day one of them had returned, for the first time since his release: John McCain, now a Republican senator from Arizona. As a Navy bomber pilot, he had been held prisoner for nearly six years, from October of 1967, when he was shot down, until March of 1973. Most of that time he had spent at Hoa Lo, more than two years of it in solitary confinement. This past summer, a large television audience heard McCain refer to the experience when he placed Bob Dole’s name in nomination at the Republican National Convention. “A long time ago, in another walk of life, I was deprived of my liberty,” he said, with the understatement of a man who knows that his imprisonment is what distinguishes him.

When McCain returned to Hoa Lo in 1993, he was accompanied by John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts. Kerry, another Navy war veteran, was the chairman of the by then disbanded Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./M.I.A. Affairs, while McCain was its leading Republican; committee business had brought them back to Vietnam. Recently, Kerry told me about the visit to the prison, describing the walk down a corridor toward McCain’s old cell—“at the back end of the right-hand side as we walked in, around the corner. It was just this very small, dark, dank cell, with a little bed area, hardly fit for anybody.”

In a recent interview with McCain, I asked him to describe the cell. “Nine or ten feet by seven feet,” he said, “a little teeny window up at the top that was barred; a metal door that had what we used to call a peep door in it, where the guard can open it and look in at you.”

McCain had communicated with the man in the next cell by tapping on the wall and listening to taps that came back. News passed along by this tap code included reports of antiwar activity at home. Peace activists like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda showed up at the Hanoi Hilton during McCain’s imprisonment. He always refused to meet with them; the prisoners hated the peaceniks. But then, more than three years into McCain’s incarceration, in April of 1971, news came of an even more disturbing antiwar demonstration. Around a thousand American soldiers recently returned from Vietnam had gathered on the Mall in Washington to denounce the war. Led by a former Navy officer, they threw the medals and ribbons they had earned over a barricade at the Capitol.

The former Navy officer who led that veterans’ protest and who “turned back” ribbons he’d won with one Silver Star, one Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts was John Kerry. Kerry told me what it was like to stand on the threshold of the prison cell with McCain: “I remember a kind of silence, and I remember distinctly that we were alone. . . . We had other people around us, but they melted into the background at that moment, and we were just standing in this place. I remember being in awe, feeling a sense of awe for what I could feel this guy must have gone through in that place.” Kerry himself was part of what McCain had gone through.

Standing with McCain at Hoa Lo brought Kerry face to face with the contradiction that had given shape to his life as surely as the prison had given shape to McCain’s. Unlike the admirably direct McCain, Kerry is a man of many complications; the difference is reflected in their very different war histories. But now McCain’s history was to the point. “It was a time for me to listen,” Kerry told me. “I asked a few questions . . . and he talked a little about it. And he talked about the friend next door that he’d communicated with, and how they’d tap. . . . He told me that they knew that some veteran had stood up and said the war was wrong. They knew what was going on.” They knew, that is, that a former Navy officer had betrayed them.

In 1984, thirteen years after that protest at the Capitol, John McCain, by then a United States representative from Arizona, went to Massachusetts to campaign against Kerry, a first-time Senate candidate. At a rally in the North End of Boston, McCain spoke in support of the Republican candidate, a businessman named Ray Shamie. “I hadn’t met John Kerry,” McCain told me. In Boston, conservative opponents had tagged Kerry as Ho Chi Minh’s candidate. McCain, in his appearance for Shamie, talked about the events of April, 1971. “I said he shouldn’t have thrown his medals on the steps, and that I heard about it while I was in prison.”

John McCain has never changed his mind about Kerry’s participation in that antiwar demonstration, but he has changed his mind about the man. Much sets the two apart. Kerry is tall and lean, with carefully coiffed dark hair, a sharp nose and chin, and a mouth that seems small for his face, which perhaps explains why his expression falls into a smile only with reluctance. He could be cast in any movie as the patrician senator. McCain looks more like a senator’s friendly appliance repairman. He is stocky, with washed-out white hair and the slightly pasty skin of a man who has been through something. But a smile comes into McCain’s face like a boat into its slip. McCain is the son and grandson of admirals, while Kerry’s mother was a Boston Brahmin and his father a Foreign Service officer. Kerry, a liberal Democrat, is at ease in the role of Senator Edward Kennedy’s junior partner; McCain is proud to hold Barry Goldwater’s Senate seat. Kerry came out of Vietnam as a leading critic of the war, McCain as one of its few true heroes.

Nevertheless, their names have become linked, both through their surprising friendship and through their work together on the Select Committee. “Kerry-McCain” is said as if it were one word. It describes legislation they have co-sponsored, and defines an unusual place in the political landscape. This past June, for example, a Kerry-McCain measure provided millions of dollars in compensation for the “lost commandos”—covert agents from South Vietnam whom the C.I.A. had long ago cut loose. “Our relationship is now so easy,” McCain told me, “this latest, on the commandos . . . was a two-minute conversation. We didn’t have to explore each other’s views or anything like that. We both thought alike, and we just did it.” Last month, when a CNBC talk show wanted comments on the United States missile attacks against Iraq, Kerry and McCain appeared as a duo. Across the boundaries of ideology, the men have formed a potent bipartisan partnership, grounded in a common, if rarely articulated, experience of the loss, grief, and bitterness that marked the generation of Americans who fought the war in Vietnam and fought against it.

McCain has long since eaten the words he uttered for Ray Shamie in 1984, and it is a good thing for John Kerry that he has. This year, Kerry, up for reëlection, is being challenged by Massachusetts’ popular Republican governor, William Weld. After two terms, Kerry has an impressive record nationally and locally, but in Massachusetts politics he is always overshadowed by Ted Kennedy, and now the contrast between his hyper-formality and Weld’s self-mocking frivolity—this summer, Weld leaped into the Charles River fully clothed—has him in trouble: he is in a dead heat with Weld in the polls. Kerry’s refusal—or inability—to play the role either of the breezy backslapper or of the sincere self-revealer seems to leave Clinton-era voters cold. At a time when the values of the sitcom and the soap opera prevail, Kerry’s reserve may mean that his best hope for November is pinned to the President’s coattails.

Few things would benefit Weld as much as a repeat of McCain’s anti-Kerry visit to Massachusetts in 1984. The Arizona senator, whose Convention role as Dole’s nominator signalled his importance, is one of the Party’s most sought-after campaigners. McCain is working hard to protect the Republican majority in the Senate, and he regards the liberalism of Democrats like Kerry as a danger to the nation’s future. Nevertheless, when I asked McCain if he would be campaigning for Weld, he shook his head, an emphatic no. “I simply would not do such a thing. I couldn’t do that. . . . I’m surprised you would ask. . . . Going to campaign against John Kerry is just something I wouldn’t consider.” McCain’s devotion to Kerry is an anomaly in American politics, and it is a measure of Kerry’s reticence that few of his home-state constituents know of it, or of the story that lies behind it.

John McCain and nearly six hundred other P.O.W.s returned home early in 1973, but the fate of more than two thousand Americans who never returned from Vietnam continued to haunt their families and the nation. Five Presidents failed to dispel the questions surrounding the missing Americans, in part because at least three of those Presidents exploited the issue shamelessly. In 1991, the matter was taken up by the Senate, and John Kerry and John McCain found themselves at the center of the effort to solve the mystery. Their struggle made of these two unlikely figures the most intimate of political friends. It would never be “I love you, man” between them, especially given Kerry’s reserve, but events would show that their bond ran deep and wide. “I like him very much,” McCain told me. “We get along very well together. The thing about the Senate is you don’t socialize with anybody.” But, he continued, “When we travel together to Vietnam . . . we talk.”

It seemed oddly right that the man with McCain at the Hanoi Hilton in 1993 was John Kerry. For the previous two years, they had, in the words of a McCain staff member, “covered each other’s backs” in a political combat over the missing Americans. Thomas Vallely, the director of the Indochina Program at the Harvard Institute for International Development and an organizer of its Vietnam Program, observed the work of the Select Committee closely. “During this period of time,” he told me recently, “there is a fucking war over this. Every day, someone is trying to destroy one or the other. And every day these guys are with each other . . . and that creates the friendship.”

Senator Kennedy observed the process, too. “Kerry and McCain stood together at a time when others on that committee were pandering to the emotions of people,” he told me. “And the critics were very tough on them. They formed a bond of respect for each other.”

That bond gave the Select Committee its structure and its purpose—and more. The partnership developed an unexpected momentum. “This was an extension of the war,” Kerry told me. “This lying and deception and avoidance were what cost a lot of my friends their lives. . . . Whether you were John Kerry or John McCain, who came at it differently, we were all let down.” And, as their committee heard every day for more than a year, it was still happening. Kerry and McCain rediscovered their own unfinished business with Vietnam, and they took responsibility for the nation’s. Ted Kennedy told me, “John Kerry did it because the issue of the war burned in his soul, and he found a soulmate in John McCain.”

Soon after Kerry and McCain returned from Hanoi, they briefed President Clinton, in the first of two crucial White House meetings. They built a new coalition in the Senate. After that Memorial Day, they returned from Vietnam to end the war.

2—RAGE AND FRIENDSHIP

John Kerry is sometimes described as a calculating, opportunistic politician. When he became romantically involved with—and then last year married—Teresa Heinz, the extremely wealthy widow of Pennsylvania’s Senator John Heinz, it seemed to some an all too convenient match for Kerry. (He has two grown daughters from a first marriage, which ended in divorce.) But these are private matters, and what has been most pointedly called into question is in fact the central public act of Kerry’s long career: Years after the event, it was reported that the medals he threw over that Capitol barricade in 1971 were not his own. They belonged to two other veterans, who could not be there. What Kerry threw of his own were the ribbons he’d received with his medals. An act of hypocrisy? A sign of wanting things both ways? Many of the veterans who participated in that protest threw away their ribbons but not their medals; few threw away both. Photographs of the Capitol steps show that medals, ribbons, other insignia, and discharge papers were thrown. What veterans chose to turn back was not an issue for them, but it has often been cited against Kerry.

I heard Kerry speak against the war on a number of occasions, beginning in the fall of 1970. I never doubted, and still don’t doubt, the authenticity of his act. Opportunism? Kerry may have harbored political ambitions when he returned from Vietnam, but, given the divisions of the era, he had good reason to believe that what he was really throwing away was his main political chance.

I was a Catholic priest at the time—a chaplain at Boston University and a campaign volunteer for the antiwar Jesuit Robert Drinan, who was running for Congress. Kerry sometimes introduced Drinan at rallies, and I remember hearing him do so once at B.U. The young Navy combat veteran was something the peace movement had not seen before, and I remember the curious silence in the packed hall as the scruffy, long-haired kids of the counterculture watched this lean, well-groomed military man approach the podium. I remember the unapologetic authority with which he laid claim to our attention. John Kerry’s knowledge of the war, unlike that of other prophets of peace, was not abstract: “We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs,” he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in the spring of 1971, “as well as by search-and-destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong. . . . We learned the meaning of free-fire zones, shooting anything that moves. . . . We watched the U.S. falsification of body counts. . . . Each day, to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, ‘the first President to lose a war.’

“We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” John Kerry’s words—the truth of lived experience—cut through the inflated rhetoric of politics and registered with the establishment. But to members of his own generation his witness meant something else still: Kerry spoke as much for those who had gone off to fight the war as for those who’d rejected it. As the son of a military man, I was particularly moved. I was a peacenik with a secret: I had grown up believing in the ethos of military honor and still longed for its redemption. Years later, I came to understand more fully how my father and others like him had tried to protect our nation’s moral integrity, but at the time Kerry was the only person who made it seem possible to be a patriot and a war objector both.

“For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action”: this is from the text of the official citation accompanying the Silver Star, awarded to Kerry for what happened in the waters of the Mekong Delta on February 28, 1969. “Kerry’s craft received a B-40 rocket close aboard. Once again Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry ordered his units to charge the enemy positions. . . . Patrol Craft Fast 94 then beached in the center of the enemy positions and an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft Fast 94 and fled. Without hesitation Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber.”

Recently, I asked Kerry about the man he killed. We had been talking for an hour or more, and for the first time he hesitated. Then he said, “It was either going to be him or it was going to be us. It was that simple. I don’t know why it wasn’t us—I mean, to this day. He had a rocket pointed right at our boat. He stood up out of a hole, and none of us saw him until he was standing in front of us, aiming a rocket right at us, and, for whatever reason, he didn’t pull the trigger—he turned and ran. He was shocked to see our boat right in front of him. If he’d pulled the trigger, we’d all be dead. . . . I just won’t talk about all of it. I don’t and I can’t. The things that probably really turned me I’ve never told anybody. Nobody would understand.” Kerry stopped. He was silent. Finally, he concluded, “These things are very personal. It was our youth.”

It was our presumed innocence, our moral simplicity. A Vietnamese soldier, for reasons that will be forever unknown, found it impossible to kill John Kerry and his men. In turn, John Kerry killed him. There is, of course, a core of moral paradox in this event: Could Kerry have simply let the man flee? But what about that loaded rocket? This paradox prevents it from being merely heroic and makes it instead, for the killer as well as the killed, tragic.

Kerry rarely speaks of his combat experience. The only time one senior aide remembered hearing him publicly refer to it was when he was speaking against the launching of Desert Storm. After the short but violent Persian Gulf War, a group of senators flew to Kuwait on an inspection trip. One was Kerry, and another was McCain. The accident of their time together in the bare C-135 military transport plane in 1991 made possible the first prolonged encounter between these two men.

“We sat up opposite each other on the plane one night,” Kerry told me. “John was sitting there in his own flight jacket”—the Navy-issue jacket from his days in flight school, with “Lt. McCain” on the patch. The fit was by then a little snug.

“We started talking about the war, and Vietnam, prison—what had happened to him, and all that. . . . Nothing had brought us together before, and we just talked. We talked about what I had done.” Kerry was referring to the episode that McCain had denounced in the 1984 campaign. “But by now it wasn’t a big hurdle,” he went on. “To his credit, he didn’t make it one. He made it clear that he had moved beyond all that. . . . The war was a tough period for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. Both of us decided to put all that kind of stuff behind us, and work together at something.”

Events gave them their common task. Within months of that conversation on the C-135, the old controversy over American soldiers abandoned in Vietnam was reawakened when newspaper front pages and then the cover of Newsweek displayed a photograph purportedly showing three American P.O.W.s still in captivity. Lurking below this issue, as always, was the war that had not yet ended. “I set out literally to bring that ending about,” Kerry told me. “I knew as a matter of policy that it should take place, and I think John felt the same way.” McCain lent Kerry his unimpeachable integrity on the question of the war that each wanted to end. Kerry drove the process, but only McCain could have enabled him to drive it home.

As a prisoner in Hoa Lo, lying on that cot in the dank cell with the “teeny” window, John McCain had put himself to sleep at night by memorizing the names of his fellow-P.O.W.s. “You start with the ‘A’s,” he told me, and he went on to describe how, through the tap code, he learned of the arrival of new prisoners. “And you fill them in to where they are in the alphabet. . . . I would just associate the names: Brudno with ‘brute’; Baker, and I’d think of a loaf of bread. I would remember the number of names under each letter.” Night after night for years, McCain maintained a mental file of the names of perhaps a hundred and seventy captives. This and other acts of P.O.W. memorization were the beginning of The List, which would haunt the nation for decades.

During McCain’s first year in the Hanoi prison, his father, Admiral Jack McCain, was appointed CINCPAC—commander-in-chief of the Pacific. Perhaps for that reason, young McCain’s captors offered to release him. On the wall of McCain’s Washington office hangs a framed State Department telegram, dated September 13, 1968. It is also stamped with the date of its declassification: September 24, 1992. It is a report to Washington from the chief American negotiator at the 1968 Paris peace talks. “At last tea break,” the text reads, “Le Duc Tho attendant. He mentioned that DRV had intended to release Admiral McCain’s son as one of the three pilots freed recently, but he had refused.” The cable is signed “Harriman.”

Despite improperly set broken bones dating from the downing of his plane, nearly a year before, and failing health generally, McCain had refused to accept release: the P.O.W. honor code required the release of men in the order of their capture, and others had been held longer than he. McCain was not let go for nearly five more years, when every P.O.W. in Hoa Lo was freed. Robert Timberg tells McCain’s prison story in his 1995 book “The Nightingale’s Song,” a study of five Annapolis graduates. When McCain refused release in 1968, a guard told him, “Now, McCain, it will be very bad for you.” A regimen of beatings and torture began. The Vietnamese set out to break McCain’s spirit.

After a week, he broke. He signed a confession that read, “I am a black criminal and I have performed deeds of an air pirate. I almost died, and the Vietnamese people saved my life.” When McCain was returned to his cell, he had changed. “The cockiness was gone, replaced by a suffocating despair,” Timberg writes. “He looked at the louvered cell window high above his head, then at the small stool in the room. He took off his dark blue prison shirt, rolled it like a rope, draped one end over his shoulder near his neck, began feeding the other end through the louvers. . . .

“A guard burst into the room, pulling McCain away from the window.”

When I asked McCain about his attitude toward John Kerry’s antiwar activity, which he still disapproves of, his answer drifted toward what he still disapproves of in himself. Referring to “The Nightingale’s Song,” he asked, “Did you read in that book that I failed? So shouldn’t that make me appreciate that others may fail also? I knew what the code of conduct was. I knew what I was supposed to do, and I knew that I ought to do everything I could to achieve that goal, everything humanly possible. And so it was pretty clear to me. And, as you know, Jim”—this was the first time McCain had addressed me familiarly—“you can appreciate this better than anyone else who’s ever interviewed me.” The bald statement cried out to be taken as a savvy politician’s shameless appeal to a writer’s narcissism, but my every instinct told me something else. I knew that McCain was thinking of his father and of mine, who were colleagues. When Lieutenant Commander John McCain III was shot down, and while Admiral McCain was CINCPAC, my father, Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll (U.S.A.F.), was the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency—the man charged with keeping track of P.O.W.s in Vietnam. It is not unlikely that, as a courtesy, my father personally briefed Admiral McCain on what the D.I.A. was learning of his son’s circumstances.

“When you grew up in that environment, your dad’s standards were clear,” McCain was saying now. “My standards were clear, and I knew that the old guy was out there, and I didn’t want him to—You know.” And I did. It was presumptuous of me, but I told McCain that, rather than any of his many acts of heroism, I regarded the moment of his degradation as the key to the man he had become. “I think you’re right,” he said. “It really was a crisis point. Maybe it changed the direction of my life somewhat, and made me a little bit different person in my relationship with others.” Then the tentativeness disappeared from his voice. “There’s no doubt about it,” he said.

It was not long after McCain was captured, in 1967, that a delegation of American peace activists, led by Tom Hayden, arrived at Hoa Lo. Years later, Hayden and McCain met in an ABC television studio, at a Vietnam retrospective with Peter Jennings as host. “There were maybe twenty-five people there,” Hayden told me recently. “I saw McCain. When he saw me, he seemed stiff and uncomfortable. The room was crowded. I approached him, and uttered a few words about reconciliation. His face softened. He reached out to me, and greeted me warmly.”

McCain recalled the encounter with Hayden at ABC, and agreed that it was significant. “I think it was a chance to say that we understood each other’s views,” he said.

Hayden, referring to something I’d written in another context, told me that McCain “had the air of a forgiven man,” meaning that McCain knew what it was to need to be forgiven, which is the only way to learn to forgive. He was the son and grandson of heroes, yet to himself he had betrayed that tradition. And he had followed in his own life the arc of the same journey that his country was making—the journey from a sure sense of moral superiority to one of shame and dishonor.

McCain is a long way from suicide now. He has had his difficulties, which included a brush with political scandal—he was named one of the Keating Five—and painful ruptures in his family life. His first marriage, to Carol Shepp, the mother of his three grown children, did not survive the aftermath of his return from Vietnam. (With his second wife, Cindy Hensley, he began a new young family, with two sons and two daughters.) Yet Tom Hayden’s observation still seems true. McCain has the air of a man at peace with himself and with the world. “We have a place in northern Arizona, in a little valley,” he said. We were sitting in his office as he told me this, and I watched his face relax as he spoke. “And my greatest pleasure—this shows you I’m in my dotage—is to get up in the morning, pour a cup of coffee, and go down to a chair that sits by this creek, and the sun’s coming up. I can’t tell you how happy I am. I can’t tell you the inner happiness that I feel when I think about my life, my family, my country, my friends. Sometimes I feel that I am far more fortunate than I deserve to be. I went through a terrible experience. I am such a better person for having had that experience that, in a way, I am fortunate.”

3—THE SECOND VIETNAM WAR

There are good reasons that Americans had such trouble bringing closure to the war in Vietnam. More than fifty million young adults made up the Vietnam generation, somewhat more than half of them males. More than eight million served in the military, and more than three million in Vietnam. Three-quarters of a million saw combat, three hundred and twenty-one thousand were wounded, fifty-eight thousand were killed. In “Achilles in Vietnam,” published in 1994, the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay says that two hundred and fifty thousand veterans still suffer from post-traumatic-stress disorder.

The war’s early years had been marked by the absolute confidence with which Robert S. McNamara tracked progress with the “body count,” a tally that subsequent events revealed to have been meaningless, if not completely false. Twenty years later, another macabre body count was being kept, as “remains” of the missing Americans were tracked down. But wild and—especially to the families of the missing—distressing inconsistencies only fuelled the patriots’ version of the anger and bitterness that resisters had experienced earlier. A 1973 figure of thirteen hundred and three M.I.A.s was shrunk in 1978 to two hundred and twenty-four. It ballooned in 1980 to twenty-five hundred. In 1987, the official number of M.I.A.s was put at two hundred and sixty-nine, but by then many veterans and family members refused to believe any government statement.

In time, myth overcame reality. The figure of the P.O.W. became a kind of national fantasy—but one with a purpose. Through the seventies and eighties, America exacted revenge on the victorious Vietnamese by demonizing them more savagely than we ever did during the conflict itself, all in terms of the prisoners they had supposedly refused to release. “Rambo” films and their imitators portrayed camps in jungles where emaciated Americans were kept in tiger cages. Boys with toys dreamed of real rescue missions, and occasionally found underwriters, like the always ready Ross Perot. Some unscrupulous vets began to exploit the longings of the families, turning the search for phantom P.O.W.s into a commercial enterprise. Eventually, their Asian counterparts made an industry of fabricating P.O.W. “evidence,” such as authentic-looking dog tags and doctored photographs, all for sale. Politicians like Bob Dole may have been sincerely concerned for the men whose names they wore on bracelets—John McCain spoke gratefully of that in his nominating speech—but the issue ran away with them.

The families—the ever more sorely haunted wives, children, sisters, brothers, and parents—were surrounded by private-enterprise jackals, but it was the callous and careless agencies of the government that continued to hurt them most. In some cases, “remains” were “discovered” years later and returned to families, but, on consulting their own experts, the families learned that the sacks of dried bones had come from Asian bodies, or even from animals. Sometimes serious evidence of the true fate of an M.I.A. was discounted, while wild rumors of “live sightings” were given credence, raising impossible hopes. The efforts of five Administrations to resolve the issue were halfhearted or hopelessly politicized—tied to a partisan agenda.

A series of P.O.W./M.I.A. hearings, committees, and commissions was begun within weeks of the release of the prisoners—including McCain—from the Hanoi Hilton in 1973. Each such undertaking eventually concluded that there was no evidence of Americans’ being held, but those for whom Rambo lives were given encouragement when Ronald Reagan embraced the P.O.W./M.I.A. issue and appeared to accept the myth of tiger cages in the jungle.

In 1987, President Reagan appointed General John Vessey, a retired former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as Special Emissary to Vietnam for P.O.W./M.I.A. affairs. He was reappointed to that position by Presidents Bush and Clinton. Vessey ultimately contributed more than any other single person to the resolution of the issue. But at first “the group around President Reagan checkmated Vessey,” Harvard’s Thomas Vallely told me. “They wanted to fight the war a little bit longer.” Whenever Hanoi came close to accomplishing what Vessey and others said was required for normalization, McCain says, “we kept moving the goalposts on them.” The Vietnamese, with reason, also did not believe what they were being told.

It had all come to seem an instance of the unities of Aristotle. Lies at the beginning of the war had become an assumption of lies long after the war had ended for everyone in the world but us. For two decades, all of this has clung to us: unresolved feelings of guilt and grief; rage at authority and loss of personal honor; diminished American self-respect; and suspicion of the neighbor whose experience of the war years was different. It was as if we had been infected with a set of viruses, related and debilitating but never quite lethal—the Vietnam syndrome exactly.

And always, in the cage at the center of this syndrome, there was the bent-head profile of the American prisoner, the one whom we had betrayed and abandoned. So how could we ignore that photograph published in July of 1991 showing three American P.O.W.s in captivity? “The Three Amigos,” they were called, and the photograph was reprinted everywhere. The families of the “captives” identified them. “That’s Daddy,” an Air Force colonel’s daughter said on “Good Morning America.”

The photograph, it turned out, was a doctored seventy-year-old picture of three Russian farmers, and had been produced by Cambodian hoaxers. But by now the P.O.W./M.I.A. issue was again intense, and highly political. Susan Katz Keating reports in her book “Prisoners of Hope” that a poll taken in the early nineties showed that seventy per cent of the American public believed that P.O.W.s were still being held captive in Southeast Asia. Senator Bob Smith, Republican of New Hampshire, called for yet another investigation, and the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./M.I.A. Affairs was authorized.

Against the advice of his staff, who saw yet another committee as a political abyss, Kerry said yes when George Mitchell, the Senate Majority Leader, asked him to chair it. “It was not a politically rewarding thing for him to take on,” Senator Kennedy told me. “And it turned out to be a true national service.”

McCain, the former prisoner, was named to the committee. He had travelled to Vietnam for President Bush, in support of General Vessey’s efforts. He had met with Vietnamese leaders. “They’ve never understood all these allegations about their keeping people behind,” he recalls. “Time after time, they would say to me, ‘Why would we keep them?’ ” McCain saw the difficulty of coaxing Vietnamese officials, for the sake of a few hundred long-missing Americans, to coöperate in the kind of investigative work that Hanoi would never be able to do for the hundreds of thousands of its own missing soldiers. He knew that Buddhists believe that an uninterred or improperly interred corpse condemns a soul to eternal wandering, so the fate of their own missing sons was far from insignificant to the Vietnamese.

“Before that committee convened, whatever harebrained and wild allegation or story came up had instant credence,” McCain told me. “By the methodical work that John Kerry did . . . Americans were made much more aware of the realities.” Kerry travelled to Vietnam eight times; he supervised the examination of thousands of documents and photographs; and he took testimony from family members, leaders of veterans’ organizations, intelligence officials, and negotiators from the Paris peace talks. He subpoenaed several hundred people, and put under oath for the first time those who had run the war, including Henry Kissinger.

Kerry and McCain, by “pulling in the same harness,” in the words of one staff member, were able to get the Vietnamese to turn over troves of P.O.W. evidence; one batch included McCain’s old flight helmet. What was perhaps more amazing, they were able to get the Department of Defense to declassify a million pages of documents. Every conceivable theory was aired, every charge levelled, and every hope given expression. And what this investigation revealed, in the words of its final report—twelve hundred and twenty-three pages long—was that “while the Committee has some evidence suggesting the possibility a POW may have survived to the present, and while some information remains yet to be investigated, there is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia.”

The judicious phrasing of this conclusion did not conceal its meaning from those who were never going to surrender the issue. They became enraged, and aimed their anger at the one person whose participation was undermining their cause: John McCain, the man who’d gone to sleep reciting the names of P.O.W.s. I saw this not long ago, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington. There visitors can buy T-shirts, decals, and other souvenirs, and they can pick up free copies of a bimonthly broadsheet, The U.S. Veteran Dispatch. On the front page of the June-July, 1996, issue is a photograph of a young John McCain, purportedly as a prisoner in Hanoi. The headline reads “PW SONGBIRD MC CAIN,” and the caption explains, “McCain earned the title ‘PW Songbird’ because of the propaganda broadcasts he made for the Reds during the Vietnam War.” The article elaborating the charge was written by a former Green Beret, a decorated Vietnam veteran. An article in a previous issue was headlined “JOHN MC CAIN: ‘THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.’ ”

“Listen,” Kerry said to me, sitting forward in his chair at his Washington home. “I defended him in those hearings when some stupid-ass right-wing idiot accused him of being the Manchurian Candidate, that somehow the Vietnamese had brainwashed him. This is the most unbelievably callous, degrading, nonsensical piece of crap I’ve ever heard in my life, coming from some chicken hawk out there, to hurl at somebody who spent as long as he did being tortured and standing up for his country, and caring about it as much as he did. It’s incredible that people would behave like that, absolutely stunning.”

Sometimes McCain was attacked by his fellow-senators and sometimes by witnesses. He was the lightning rod. I was told by a member of the committee staff that when Kerry and McCain were sitting near each other on the senators’ dais, Kerry would, at such moments, unobtrusively move his hand over to McCain and place it on his arm and leave it there, a quiet gesture of what was becoming absolute mutual support. I asked McCain if he had been aware of Kerry’s touch. “Yes,” he replied. “He did that several times, and I’m glad he did. I’m grateful to him.”

In 1992, as the Kerry committee’s deliberations were nearing their conclusion, McCain was up for reëlection. That fall, he made one of his numerous trips to Vietnam, going over and back in a weekend. His Democratic opponent seized on the trip, criticizing McCain with more than an implication that he was grandstanding. Kerry had been the object of such attacks himself, so he immediately organized a letter from the members of the committee, Democrats and Republicans alike, defending McCain. Senator Bob Kerrey, of Nebraska, a committee member and a Medal of Honor winner, had gone to Arizona to campaign for the Democrat, but he, too, supported McCain on the issue. McCain won the election. Kerry and McCain had come a long way from the North End of Boston.

“During deliberations of the committee,” McCain told me, referring to the end of the process, “John Kerry felt it was very important to have everybody—all the Republicans, all the Democrats—sign on to that report, because, if one or two people didn’t, then the radicals would leap onto that person. A couple of times, I had very spirited exchanges, to say the least, with a couple of senators—in-your-face kind of exchanges. John Kerry—to his everlasting credit, and to my everlasting discredit, O.K.?—constantly said, ‘Let’s discuss it. Let’s talk about it.’ He was very mature in handling this—more mature than I was.”

The Select Committee’s report, issued on January 13, 1993, has the signature of every member. Its unanimous, bipartisan finding of “no compelling evidence” would essentially remove the issue of abandoned captives from mainstream political debate, but the process that had led to this finding was equally important. In effect, Kerry and McCain had presided over the final stages of the nation’s grief work, providing a forum in which the last untold stories of the war dead could be told.

The committee finished its task just as Bill Clinton took office. The next step would be to lift the embargo, leading to normalization of relations between the two countries. But would Clinton do it? George Bush, a veteran of another war, could have taken the first step, but, for his own reasons, he chose not to. During the 1992 Presidential campaign, he had been hooted down at a convention of P.O.W./M.I.A. activists. Perhaps, as Vallely surmised, he decided “to leave this mess to his successor, who had not served in the war.”

Clinton, early in his Administration, was warned by leaders of veterans’ groups not to appear at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Upon hearing that, McCain—“almost impulsively,” he told me—offered to accompany the President there. Kerry and McCain would accompany Clinton to the end. In a crucial White House meeting on June 11, 1993, less than two weeks after their visit to Hoa Lo prison, the two senators urged the President to lift the embargo, offering geopolitical and economic reasons but also emphasizing the matter of national honor, since the Vietnamese had diligently done all that we had asked them to in the matter of M.I.A.s. But the conservative Republican Senator Bob Smith, who was vice-chair of Kerry’s committee, urged Clinton “not to be deceived,” and argued against lifting the embargo.

A week later, on June 19th, President Clinton went to Boston to deliver the commencement address at Northeastern University, and the two Massachusetts senators served as his escorts. The event took place at the old Boston Garden. Senator Kennedy told me, “We had time backstage with the President, and John just spent the whole time filling the President in on all that was involved in normalization. It was really very powerful, his face-to-face presentation to the President, laying it all out. And what he did was absolutely indispensable to the President, and how the President could bring the whole thing to a conclusion.” But that summer and fall Clinton remained noncommittal.

In January, 1994, a Kerry-McCain-sponsored Senate resolution urged the President to lift the embargo. A few veterans mobilized in opposition, drawing the support of the American Legion and the Republican leadership. McCain’s sponsorship persuaded twenty Republicans to vote for the measure, which passed by a vote of sixty-two to thirty-eight. McCain said, “The vote will give the President the kind of political cover he needs to lift the embargo.” The fact is, however, that the President’s real cover was coming from Kerry and McCain. The one had come to represent the United States government’s long-overdue determination to tell the truth about Vietnam; the other was the military hero become a figure of healing. Together, their credibility on the question was absolute.

On February 4, 1994, a Times headline read “CLINTON DROPS 19-YEAR TRADE EMBARGO ON VIETNAM.” Above it appeared the most wrenching photograph of the war—the one of the naked girl, amid other children, running toward the camera, away from what the caption called “an aerial napalm strike in 1972.”

Bob Dole, by then the Republican leader, said that lifting the embargo was “the wrong decision at the wrong time for the wrong reason.” In the spring of 1995, he and Senator Phil Gramm, of Texas, introduced a bill urging Clinton not to grant full diplomatic recognition to Vietnam; they wanted to resuscitate the issue of sixteen hundred and nineteen missing Americans. Then, on May 23, 1995, Kerry and McCain met with Clinton in the Oval Office. Against Dole, they made the case for normalization. McCain concluded by saying, “It doesn’t matter to me anymore, Mr. President, who was for the war and who was against the war. I’m tired of looking back in anger. What’s important is that we move forward now.” Clinton had once famously said he “despised” the war. Now he was being asked by one of its heroes to end it. To others present, he seemed moved by McCain’s statement. He thanked McCain but still made no commitment. Then, on July 11, 1995, he summoned Cabinet members, the top military brass, congressional leaders, the heads of veterans’ groups, and others to the White House. Standing resolutely on the podium, he declared, “Today I am announcing the normalization of diplomatic relationships with Vietnam.” After a brief statement, he concluded, “This moment offers us the opportunity to bind up our own wounds. They have resisted time for too long. We can now move on to common ground. Whatever divided us before let us consign to the past. Let this moment, in the words of the Scripture, be a time to heal, and a time to build.” Then Bill Clinton turned immediately to the man next to him, John McCain. They began by shaking hands, but then embraced emotionally. The President turned next to John Kerry.

A year later, the only freestanding foreign-sponsored academic institution in Vietnam, attached to the Ho Chi Minh City Economics University, is a project of Harvard’s Institute for International Development and the American Council of Learned Societies. It is called the Fulbright Center, and was dedicated in November of 1995, four months after normalization. On that occasion, Thomas Vallely, himself a former marine who served in Vietnam in 1969 and part of 1970, told the audience, “This teaching center is a gift to the Vietnamese people from the American people, a gift conceived by John Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts.” Vallely went on to acknowledge John McCain as well: “I think that if we could overhear the voices of those silent American veterans whose names are engraved on the black granite wall in Washington, they would agree with Senator McCain and say that it was time for Americans to remember the many silent Vietnamese veterans and to reach out toward Vietnam in a peace of the brave.”

In 1994, the United States ranked fourteenth among foreign investors in Vietnam. A year later, it ranked sixth. Today, in Hanoi, the Hoa Lo prison is no more. It was torn down to make way for a hotel complex—a facility made necessary, in part, by the many American veterans who have begun to return to Vietnam. The Vietnamese Ambassador-designate to the United States, Le Van Bang, told me, “American soldiers are coming back to Vietnam. We understand why they come, and we welcome them.”

The site of the nightmare from which America found it so difficult to awaken is becoming a place in which tourists sleep; the unlikely friendship of two American politicians made it possible. “John Kerry and John McCain did a noble service to this country,” Senator Kennedy told me. “I know that kind of talk doesn’t ring any bells anymore, but it’s true. A noble service.” In Vietnam, they are revered as the men who ended the war. And the most potent symbol of the new era is what has become of the Hanoi Hilton. As for the hotel replacing the prison, McCain told me, “When I saw it, they asked me what I thought. I said, ‘I hope room service is better than it was when I was here.’ ” ♦

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